What's new with Microsoft Azure for 2025

Microsoft Azure remains the second largest cloud service provider with 24% of the market share globally but boasts the most availability zones, spanning 60+ regions worldwide. Over the past 12 months, the platform has seen major advancements across AI and infrastructure, and we share some of the highlights in this blog.

Strengthening AI developments with OpenAI

Microsoft’s longstanding partnership with OpenAI, which began in 2019, has entered a new phase. Microsoft now has exclusive rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property, allowing seamless integration of OpenAI models within Azure-based products such as Copilot. The OpenAI API remains exclusive to Azure, ensuring customers benefit from cutting-edge AI models tailored to their needs.

Additionally, OpenAI has made a substantial new Azure commitment which deepens their partnership, whereby Microsoft has the right of first refusal on new OpenAI capacity.

Meeting AI regulations

Regulatory compliance is a growing global priority, particularly in Europe. Recognising this, Microsoft has pledged to comply with all relevant laws, including the EU AI Act, and has continued to invest in AI governance. Microsoft is actively building AI products and services to align with the new regulations, supporting customers in deploying AI responsibly and compliantly.

Introducing the o1 Model in Azure OpenAI Service

The o1 model represents a significant leap in AI capabilities, enhancing multimodal reasoning with text and vision input support. Businesses leveraging Azure OpenAI Service can now process and analyse visual data, generate insightful responses, and deliver advanced AI applications with greater efficiency. These are the key highlights:

• Vision input: Enabling AI to interpret images and generate context-aware text outputs.
• Lower latency: The o1 model uses 60% fewer reasoning tokens than its predecessor, improving response times.
• Expanded context window: Supporting up to 200K tokens, facilitating more complex AI interactions.

Infrastructure enhancements for AI and beyond

Azure is expanding its infrastructure to meet the growing demands of AI-driven workloads. Key developments include:

• Azure Maia AI accelerators and Cobalt CPUs: Custom silicon designed for AI efficiency and security.
• ND H200 V5 VM series: Featuring NVIDIA H200 GPUs, delivering double the performance gains compared to previous generations.
• Oracle Database@Azure: Now available in nine regions, offering hyper-elastic scaling, enhanced security, and improved Microsoft Fabric integration.

Advancing AI innovation

AI is driving the next wave of technological development, and Azure continues to innovate in this space. Microsoft introduced Azure AI Foundry, a new unified platform designed to accelerate AI adoption across businesses. By integrating with familiar tools such as GitHub, Visual Studio, and Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry streamlines AI development and deployment. Key features include:

• Azure AI Foundry SDK: Unifying AI tools within a single ecosystem.
• Azure AI Studio Evolution: Transforming into an enterprise-grade AI management portal.
• Comprehensive AI adoption guidance: Providing best practices, reference architectures, and resources to accelerate AI transformation.

Beyond foundational AI tools, Microsoft is also advancing enterprise automation with AI agents – autonomous systems that streamline routine tasks, boost efficiency, and free up human resources. To support this, Azure has launched the AI Agent Service, offering:

• Seamless enterprise data integration: Connecting with Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Fabric, and other key data sources.
• Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS) and private networking: Ensuring compliance and data security.
• Scalable AI-powered workflows: Allowing businesses to automate processes while maintaining oversight.

Azure expands its global availability zones

Today, Microsoft Azure is present in 60+ regions worldwide and has over 185 global network PoPs, and continues to expand its global infrastructure. Recent developments include:

• Microsoft announced plans to invest €4.3 billion over two years to enhance AI and cloud infrastructure in northern Italy, marking its largest investment in the country to date.
• In June 2024, Microsoft opened its first cloud region in Spain, located in multiple locations within the Community of Madrid. This region offers Artificial Intelligence and cloud services to companies and public entities in Spain and across Europe, ensuring reliability, security, privacy, and data residency.
• Construction has been completed on three sites in Saudi Arabia, with availability expected in 2026. This new data centre region will provide enterprise-grade reliability and performance, adhering to customer privacy, data residency, and high-speed latency standards.

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